Post navigation

How Teachers Can You Social Media?

As a professor, you might be having a hard time implementing ways of using social media in order to engage students and help them learn. I see social media as a great learning tool (as I have previously stated) since our generation already uses it in our everyday lives, why not incorporate it as a learning tool to aid in our college learning process?!

From an article my classmate helped me find online, there are 6 important strategies I found interesting to help incorporate social media into the classroom, and they are the following:

Set a good example- it is important to explain to students the proper way of using social media in the classroom and the importance of monitoring their classroom profiles.

Create a class Facebook page- creating a class Facebook page can be extremely beneficial especially for explaining assignments, communicating class activity/changes, and deadlines. Teachers can interact with students in a way they understand and students can get immediate updates on class activity and assignments in one place.

Establish online guidelines- as with all assignments, it is important to create guidelines. I found this strategy to be very important because it is vital that professors keep track and set specific guidelines for the way they want to use social media within their classes. They can manage private settings and such depending on the tool they are using to better monitor these sites while using them for learning purposes.

Devise a Twitter “channel”- this strategy is one I can relate to the most because as college student, I have used this method many times with classes and it has proved to be extremely successful! As an example, I had a question for my EDIT 2000 class I am currently in, and was able to ask my professor the questions via our class Twitter handle and see that other students were also having the same question. I was able to get my question answered on a timely manner and seeing what my other peers needed as well in order to solve my problem.

Use Skype for guest speakers- this was a strategy I had never thought of! Sometimes guest speakers just aren’t able to come on site to our college so what better way to accommodate a guest lecture than simply having it via Skype! This is a great way to reach important and relevant speakers that simply are not able to travel to the university. It allows professors to broaden their lesson plans and gives students the opportunity to listen to great information!

Get ideas from your peers- getting stuck on a project or assignments? What better way to get through this hurdle than to ask your fellow peers for advice! Instead or trying to find their numbers or email addresses, having a class social media site set up can help students exchange ideas on class topics and assignments.

I found these strategies to be very interesting and true and 100% recommend college professors to take advantage of all the online tools that can be used! Because in the end, who doesn’t get bored of just listening to lecture after lecture? What do you think?

Happy Blogging! 🙂

p.s. – I have attached the article here so you can read if interested!